At Slam-N-Jam, Area Team Rallied Around the Cause

The South Bay All-Stars, made up of players from Carson and Bishop Montgomery highs, among other schools, were eliminated early in the Slam-N-Jam National Invitational basketball tournament last week at Cal State Long Beach, but they didn’t go easily.

The team won only one game in pool play and one in the tournament--that by forfeit. South Bay was eliminated from the tournament by All-Ohio White, 76-74, Tuesday morning, but nearly pulled off the comeback of the week.

With All-Ohio White leading, 70-52, and less than eight minutes remaining, South Bay, which was missing six players because of summer school classes, switched to a full-court press. The team went on a 22-4 run and tied the score at 74 on San Pedro native Schea Cotton’s dunk with 30 seconds left.

All-Ohio eventually won the game on free throws with time expired.

“We just (said), ‘We can win, it’s not over,’ ” Carson junior Jamaal Reed said of South Bay’s rally. “We had a lot of time. Schea and I got together and said ‘Hey, let’s do it. They can’t handle the ball, so let’s take it from them.’ ”

Cotton, an incoming freshman at St. John Bosco in Bellflower, dominated play for the South Bay, scoring 35 points, including hitting 12 of 14 free throws in the fourth quarter. Carson’s Charles Perry added 11 points.

*

After Washington, D.C., beat All-Ohio Red, 76-75, in the semifinal round of the Slam-N-Jam, Carson Coach Ade Kido noticed Washington’s Victor Page walking gingerly toward the sideline.

“Why are you limping?” Kido asked the 6-foot-4 off-guard.

“My feet hurt,” Page said.

“I told him to take his shoes off, and when he did, his socks were full of blood,” Kido said. “And when he took his socks off, I noticed his nails were all curled back and cut up. He was playing with his toes all crunched under.”

Turns out, Page’s shoes weren’t really Page’s shoes. When the Washington, D.C., native was packing for his trip to Long Beach, he mistakenly packed his brother’s shoes instead of his own. And at size 9 1/2, his brother’s shoes were about a size too small for Page’s feet.

“I said, ‘I don’t care,’ ” Page said. “ ‘I’m going to play.’ I didn’t feel the pain when I was running, so I just kept on running. After the game, I felt it, but during the game, I don’t feel any pain.”

Nonetheless, Kido bought Page a new pair of size-10 1/2 shoes to wear in the championship game.

“I feel good now,” Page said. “I got my new shoes on. I feel like an animal out there now.”

So was it the shoes? Not quite. Playing in his brother’s shoes in the semifinal game, Page upstaged All-Ohio Red standouts Jerod Ward and Samaki Walker with 20 points. In the championship game, with his new shoes, the senior was held to 13 points as his team beat L.A.-based Team Converse, 68-64.

Thursday night’s championship game was preceded by Slam-N-Jam’s annual dunk contest, which ended in a tie between Cotton and Brandon Wade of Rockwell City, Iowa.

Wade, a senior at Rockwell City-Lytton High, earned the judges’ (and the crowd’s) respect when he narrowly missed a dunk after taking off from the free-throw line in the first round.

Wade made it to the final round, though, and as he was preparing for his final dunk, the judges shouted a guarantee of victory if he tried the free-throw dunk again and succeeded.

With spectators scrambling toward the south basket for a better view, Wade, the Iowa state Class 1-A champion high jumper with a leap of 6-foot-6, began his approach from the opposite baseline, took off and dunked the ball with one hand for a perfect score of 40.

Cotton missed his first dunk in the final round, but a judge’s ruling gave him a second chance and the 15-year-old made the most of it. Cotton jumped over two crouching teammates, took a high bounce pass from his brother James and slammed the ball with two hands for a perfect score and share of the title.

In what was by far the most animated performance of the dunk contest, Jamal Livingston of Riverside Church in New York City did a two-handed, off-the-glass jam, followed by a crowd-pleasing dance with three of his teammates. The dunk got a perfect 40, but Livington’s next dunk, in the final round, clanked off the iron and he failed to score.

He didn’t dance after that one.